PeepinGoodArgs

You know what's weird? I've heard it so many times: getting a PhD is about putting in the work and less about being intelligent.

From my perspective, if we want a smarter society, we need a society willing to do the work of actually being smart and informed. But that kinda has to start with us, who are loathe to read a god damn book, let alone substantively be informed. So, yeah, makes perfect sense that it'd be easier to just be unethical than put in the work.

It was enough for me to read the first sentence and just not read the rest. It's all a variation on a theme.

In a sobering indication of the shortfall in the required effort to avoid disastrous climate change, most of the world’s biggest carbon emitters were absent, including Joe Biden, president of the US, and Xi Jinping, president of China – leaders of the two largest polluters.

Also absent was France’s Emmanuel Macron, India’s Narendra Modi and Britain’s Rishi Sunak...

Yo, fuck these people.

Because young people need to build this connections

Also, opportunities for different policies are determined by the political cycle. Bold policies are usually done at the beginning of a term, presidential or otherwise because they know they've got the American people behind their back. They were just elected after all.

Mid-terms are usually when they focus on the economy and other things closer to normal people so that when the election roles around, what that politician did will be more salient in the voter's mind.

...in the end it’s the only practical way we can currently sequester all of the CO2 we dumped into the atmosphere over the last 200 years of coal burning.

And that's why it's unrealistic. That's a lot. And it's not only in the air, it's in the oceans, too. The scale at which CCS needs to work is...honestly almost impossible for me to wrap my head around.

Not to mention, oil companies use CCS to justify their business model. Because, if you can remove CO2 in the atmosphere, why not dump more?

Let's just go to Heritage.org...published just yesterday:

Well, there’s weather and there’s climate change, and climate change is measured over very long periods of time, so a hot summer does not necessarily mean there’s climate change. And there are all kinds of other issues coming up with how we measure it, how the oceans affect global temperatures, how the clouds affect temperatures, how the sun affects temperatures, and climate change has been going on for millennia. I certainly don’t think that we’re headed towards a catastrophe, and if we are facing warming of 1.52 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the question is what to do about it.

Is that an acknowledgement of the climate crisis? No, it is not.

I can, but totalitarianism isn't a viable alternative.

It's like asking me if I'm so dirty, am I so accustomed to the comfort of showers that I can't imagine the benefits of an acid bath. Like...no, I'm not taking an acid bath regardless of how clean it makes me.

I eat guacamole and avocados every now and then even though I don't like either. I think it's important to repeatedly try things that I otherwise don't like. It's how I've come to love blue cheese and coffee.

Your body adapts to bitterness. But most importantly, there’s a difference between buying good coffee, grinding and preparing it how you like it, versus buying 8 month old burnt pieces of leaves and some coffee from Walmart and shoving sugar with vegetable oil on top.

Less than a year ago I drank tea exclusively.

I started with ground Dunkin' Donuts Original because that's what my wife drank. I didn't like it, but if I added Torani syrup to it, it was actually pretty good. It became my morning coffee.

Then, still with ground coffee, my wife said she liked Krispy Kreme coffee better but they don't sell it in stores. I found it on Amazon and it was indeed better.

Then, I was like, "Well...we have a grinder...let's use it." So, I bought Dunkin' Donuts Original whole bean at the store. It tasted significantly better than Krispy Kreme! Even my wife agreed. I could tell grinding the beans at home was a game changer.

Then I went to Hawaii. For a week straight, I drank pretty crappy coffee with a bit of cream. It gave me that bitter flavor that I'd come to love, but it wasn't satisfying in the way that I knew coffee could be. I guess was preparing myself for heaven by going through hell? Idk. But we found a coffee in Kona that is so good I can make a whole pot and drink it black. When I first tasted it at home, I understood in my bones why people enjoy a morning cup of coffee.

So yeah, huge difference between buying good coffee and preparing it how you like it versus that other crap.

Literally their playbook for decades. The government sucks in their hands because they make it suck, not because it's inherently ineffective. But suckers are gonna suck.

Yes! All those underused symbols are useful when you just get a train-of- thought going.